Antonio Cordella

a.cordella@lse.ac.uk

ISIG – Dept. Management

London School of Economics and Political Science

“e-Government: have we forgotten of the public sector context?”

“E-Government: Concepts and practices in mature and developing Countries”

Common approach

• e-Government reforms are intrinsically embedded in combinations of political reforms and organizational changes, designed to enact, support and drive a profound transformation in the organization of the public sector.

• ICT is mainly conceived as a short cut to increase public sector efficiency and improve internal administration and management capabilities.

• By focusing on these goals, e-Government reforms have often neglected to discuss the broader impacts ICT can have on public sector organizations and the services they deliver.

• There is a limited focus on the broad effects that ICT has on the transformation in the public sector.

e-Government: is it successful?

• The success of e-Government is not linear as expected.

• e-Government often fails to deliver the predicted results.

• Failures are frequently discussed as a temporary stage in the process of administrative reforms.

• These failures are therefore described as a temporary outcome that will be overcome when the overall projects of reform will be implemented.

ICT: efficiency and costs reduction

• Technology is perceived as the solution to make more efficient and transparent the government’s activities, reducing the needs for normative, rule based mechanisms of coordination.

• Government spin doctors have largely fostered the idea that technological deployment in the public sector is a shortcut to achieve public reforms as proposed by NPM.

• Less bureaucracy more efficiency.

Bureaucracy leads to efficiency

“Rules stabilize and hold together the elaborate, complex system of authority, status, and technical skills which constitute modern bureaucratic organizations. Rules reduce uncertainty by eliminating, as far as is possible, the influence of individuals and creating a permanent and predictable structure of relationships independent of the position.” (Anderson, 1968)

Bureaucracy and democracy

• The bureaucratic system is a fundamental pillar of modern democracies.

• Dismantle bureaucracies in favour of a market oriented organisation as proposed by NPM can have profound effects on democratic values.

e-Government is not neutral

• The discourse of the NPM reforms tries to embrace not only economic or managerial values but also political ones.

• The effects that e-Government can have on the access, delivery, and consumption of public services and therefore on the social and political aspects related to government’s action is often neglected.

• Changes in public service delivery mechanisms can have profound effects on the social value of the provided services.

• e-Government has mainly looked at NPM to inform the reorganization of public sector offices.

Beyond NPM

• NPM is only one of the possible strategies to be followed in e-government polices.

• ICT is not only a tool to transform bureaucracies in market or customers oriented organisations, it is also a tool to support bureaucratic functions.

• The implementation of ICT, automating existing administrative procedures, can possibly improve the administrative system’s efficiency and effectiveness without changing its underpinning logic.

ICT and bureaucracy

• This conceptual model for e-government polices, while considering the opportunities opened by ICT deployments, does not neglect the importance of bureaucratic organisation as mechanisms to enforce fundamental democratic values such as impartiality and equality of citizens in front of the state.

ICT and bureaucracy

• The value enforced by bureaucratic organisations: impartiality and equality are valuable outputs that have to be preserved while considering alternative forms to coordinate the action of public offices.

• This suggests to look at the failure of bureaucratic systems in delivering public services as a problem, but does not consider bureaucracy the problem.

ICT and bureaucracy

• This relies upon the assumption the bureaucratic organisation has to be preserved as long as it is able to provide coordination better than alternative organisational structures, such as markets like organisations.

• This assumption does not pretend, as other forms of evaluation, to compare the costs of running a bureaucratic organisation vis a vis the cost of running a market like organisation.

ICT and bureaucracy

• It is not possible to compare markets like organisations and bureaucracies that provide similar services using different organisational structures.

• The organisational structure itself defines part of the value of the public services.

ICT and bureaucracy

• Bureaucracies have failed delivering services effectively because they have not been able to handle the increasing amount of information and coordination activities that are nowadays needed to provide what have historically been considered traditional public services.

ICT and bureaucracy

• The failures are due to the incapacity of the PA to manage the internal and external information flow and to process this information flow along the line of the legal rational procedural mechanism.

• ICT, and hence e-Government polices in general, should first try to answer this problem.

• Where ICT fails to support electronically the bureaucratic organisation is where there is space to re-think the nature of the services and the media trough which they are delivered.

ICT and bureaucracy

• All the other cases should be addressed designing and generally conceiving ICT solutions to support and where possible to foster the bureaucratic capacity to handle within their structural mechanism the new, always increasing information flows.

e-Government: state-citizens relationship

• E-Government can alter the state-citizens relationship by:

changing the nature of the delivered services

creating inequalities among citizens

delivering new and different services

cancelling existing services

reconfiguring the organisation of public offices

offering new ways of interactions

making citizens directly involved in the production and delivery of services

………….

e-Government: state-citizens relationships

• Accordingly, e-Government should pay more attention to the complexity that is associated with their implementation in particular on the consequences the transformation of the relationship between citizens and the state can have on shared expectation on the action of the government.

• By downplaying this difference ICTs in the public sector have been designed and managed along the basic principles of efficiency that are governing the private sector (i.e. six sigma).

• Outcomes of public sector reforms have however an impact on social, political and institutional policy making that are not accounted for in private sector frameworks.

ICT makes politics

• The technological choices and designs and the characteristics and functionalities of hardware and software configurations are thus part of this policy-making process and deserve to be studied as such.

• Technology is a carrier of specific and contingent e-Government policy aims that not only last because enacted in social, institutional and organisational practices, but also because embedded in the technological systems themselves and enacted in organisational practices.

• ICT makes politics.

e-Government: multiple objectives

• e-Government can consist of and deliver multiple objectives, such as narrow economic objectives (cost saving), broader outcomes (economic growth), and the creation and maintenance of socially shared expectation of fairness, trust, legitimacy whose definition cannot be detached from the socially shaped context within which they are defined.

e-Government: multiple objectives

• To prioritize management practices which have been designed on the basis of critical performance objectives centered on efficiency and economy performances largely reflect the economic framing of government activities and the reconstruction of citizens as customers, as proposed by NPM.

• e-Government is a public policy with consequences that go beyond impacts on economic and/or organizational performances.

e-Government in its context

• We need to move towards contingent and political dependent indicators which are closely related to the ultimate outcomes the administration is expected to deliver.

• The search for objective administrative measurements of the activities of public servants and public organizations should be relegated at a secondary level.

• The socio, political, and institutional outcome of e-Government policies should therefore be the main dimension to be accounted for when public sector ICTs are designed, implemented, managed, and assessed.